Salt worker, Sečovlje
There is a point at which he leans
and pauses, and the sun bleaches
the edges from the salt pile,
the wooden rake, the tracks and carts
with their drapery of halite.
His face gleams like flowstone,
eyes fix upon a line
pinning tool huts all the way
to the horizon,
a land
brimming sea and salt-blooms
above carpets of petola,
quiet pans of algae, gypsum, clay
where egrets pick their way
through cubes of sky.
He is listening to the voice
of the salt, the tinkering of the sea
as it abandons its minerals
at his feet.
Terns blow in from the ocean.
Swallows sweep the Giassi channel
past the new museum.
The sea drifts out to join the sky.
He does not move.
A rime of salt blisters his lips,
gathers in his desiccated bones.
Eight centuries of shift and hiss;
he closes his eyes,
balances against the light.
Jane Lovell lives in Rugby, Warwickshire. Her poems, which have been published in a range of journals including Agenda, Poetry Wales and Myslexia, focus on our relationship with nature, from a flea wearing tiny jewelled boots created by a Russian miniaturist to a circus elephant butchered during food shortages in post-war Vienna. Threads of folklore and science run through her work.